Stop Waiting For DNS!

I am an impulse domain buyer. I tend to purchase silly names for simple sites that only serve the purpose of an inside joke. The thing about impulse-buying a domain is that DNS propagation generally takes a day or so, and setting up a Web site with a virtual hostname can be delayed while you wait for your Web site address to go "live".

Thankfully, there's a simple solution: the /etc/hosts file. By manually entering the DNS information, you'll get instant access to your new domain. That doesn't mean it will work for the rest of the Internet before DNS propagation, but it means you can set up and test your Web site immediately. Just remember to delete the entry in /etc/hosts after DNS propagates, or you might end up with a stale entry when your novelty Web site goes viral and you have to change your Web host!

The format for /etc/hosts is self-explanatory, but you can add comments by preceding with a # character if desired.

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Shawn Powers is a Linux Journal Associate Editor. You might find him on IRC, Twitter, or training IT pros at CBT Nuggets.

If you have a small network and an always-on server, you can easily set up your own DNS server with dnsmasq (http://www.thekelleys.org.uk/dnsmasq/doc.html, or try "apt-get dnsmasq" if you have a Debian-based distro). I got tired of managing a hosts file on each of my home machines. Now I just point my DNS to a local address. And you don't need to wait for changes to propagate - just reload or restart the dnsmasq service.

Here's a shell script I wrote that aggregates a few of the more popular blackhole sites into a single HOSTS file. I also change 127.0.0.1 to 0.0.0.0 because this bypasses the wait for the resolver to fail.

besides using it when waiting for a DNS change to propagate over the Internet, I'm also using /etc/hosts for mapping my local virtual machines to a static local ip and it's great as I can easily access the virtual machines by their code-names.

I also have habbit to give names to my public machines that are not setup in the DNS zone file, so /etc/hosts come handy in this case as well.

Geek Guides

Pick up any e-commerce web or mobile app today, and you’ll be holding a mashup of interconnected applications and services from a variety of different providers. For instance, when you connect to Amazon’s e-commerce app, cookies, tags and pixels that are monitored by solutions like Exact Target, BazaarVoice, Bing, Shopzilla, Liveramp and Google Tag Manager track every action you take. You’re presented with special offers and coupons based on your viewing and buying patterns. If you find something you want for your birthday, a third party manages your wish list, which you can share through multiple social- media outlets or email to a friend. When you select something to buy, you find yourself presented with similar items as kind suggestions. And when you finally check out, you’re offered the ability to pay with promo codes, gifts cards, PayPal or a variety of credit cards.